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Stranger Than Fiction

The purpose of this appreciative editorial about Mike McGrady is not to entice you to buy or read “Naked Came the Stranger,” the dirty 1969 best seller that was destined to be in the first line of Mr. McGrady’s obituary ever since he wrote it — with a couple of dozen other Newsday journalists — and got it published. It’s not a good book. For parodic thrills, you may be better off with “Naked Came the Manatee,” by Carl Hiaasen and Dave Barry, among others. Same idea, but a lot cheaper on Amazon.

No, the thing we admire about Mr. McGrady, who died on Sunday, age 78, is more the quality of his wit and his journalism than the deathless awfulness of his fiction.

The hoax novel was inspired by Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins, and attributed to a “demure Long Island housewife” named Penelope Ashe, but actually written by Mr. McGrady and his colleagues, who divided up the chapters. Trash it truly was. As The Times put it back then, the editing involved “cutting out words of more than three syllables, all symbolism, most character descriptions and 90 percent of all references to nature.” What remained was said to have left Bill Moyers, then Newsday’s publisher, with an “expression of benign disgust,” which Mr. Moyers’s followers can still sometimes see on PBS.

Mr. McGrady’s strange success was a product of its times, which happened also to be very good ones for newspapers. That newsroom in particular — Newsday’s, in Garden City, Long Island — was a close-knit group of men and women who won Pulitzer Prizes and covered the world. Mr. McGrady’s bad-fiction project, in fact, was interrupted by a reporting tour in Vietnam and then a Nieman fellowship at Harvard. What he built in the years that followed — news articles and columns, movie and restaurant reviews — remains a fine body of work, all on top of the money and fame from “Naked Came the Stranger.”

A version of this editorial appears in print on May 16, 2012, on Page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: Stranger Than Fiction. Today's Paper|Subscribe